It happened again a few days ago. Even now, every once in a while if I’m running late and have dashed out of the house, within 10 seconds I’ll have a sudden, disorienting, anxious thought: “Wait! Where’s my mask?” All those months of making sure I added a mask to my get-out-the-door routine have left vestigial unease. It’s a feeling akin to forgetting to buckle up a seatbelt, a quick frisson of discomfiture at my thoughtless, reckless behavior. And yet there’s no need any longer to be facially strapped in, as I realize immediately. Whew!
Some of my fellow Tokyo train commuters, colleagues, and students continue to wear masks, though the number seem to be going down as time goes by. Then again, masks were always popular in Japan, to prevent infecting others when down with a cold or the flu, to avoid pollen, or to hastily don on busy mornings when there’s no time to apply makeup.
This ingrained mask-wearing custom is often considered one of the reasons there was much less resistance in Japan to wearing them during the pandemic compared to many other countries. However, in a paper published last year, cross-cultural psychologist Fatima Nayani and three collaborators suggest that there is more going on than mere habitual practice. The researchers hypothesized that Japanese people may generally maintain that emotion can be read via the eyes, whereas Americans might typically feel that not being able to see the mouth could appreciably hinder one’s ability to figure out what someone else is feeling. Naturally, there would be more pushback against a procedure that encumbered emotional intelligence in an essential way.
To test their hypothesis, Nayani and her team administered a questionnaire to 266 Japanese people and 348 Americans asking them to evaluate the statements “It is difficult for me to interpret feelings of other people when they wear [a mask / sunglasses] on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). The Japanese participants were much more likely to disagree with the notion that masks make it difficult to understand what someone is feeling, with an average score of 1.67 compared to 3.08 for the Americans. The Japanese respondents also had a lower evaluation for perceived difficulty in reading the emotions of someone wearing sunglasses than the Americans, with an average score of 2.30 compared to 2.89. Within-country comparisons show that the Japanese find it less difficult to recognize the emotions of mask-wearers compared to sunglass-wearers (1.67 vs. 2.30) while the opposite was true for the Americans (3.08 vs. 2.89).
This research dovetails nicely with some earlier research conducted by two of the researchers in the current study, Masaki Yuki and William Maddux, along with Takahiko Masuda. They showed Japanese and Americans three emoticon faces: one with happy eyes and a neutral mouth, one with neutral eyes and a sad mouth, and one with happy eyes and a sad mouth. The respondents were asked to evaluate the happiness of each face on a scale of one (extremely sad) to nine (extremely happy). The average score for the happy eyes/neutral mouth was 7.5 for the Japanese, and happy eyes/sad mouth still garnered an average score of 6. But the Americans didn’t give any of the faces an average score of more than 4.5.
When the emoticon faces were adjusted to include happy mouths, the Americans’ scores for these were slightly higher than the Japanese scores. And when photos of real people were manipulated though computer graphics, the Americans again rated photos with happy mouths higher than their Japanese counterparts, with the assessments switched when it came to happy eyes.
Another cultural difference “unmasked”!
As an American who has lived in Japan for many years, I can certainly relate to the fact that Japanese people definitely tend to rely heavily on non-verbal cues that come from the eyes. However, you have added statistically significant metrics to support this observation. Thank you for sharing the data along with your insights.
So good to know that there’s some research behind one’s impressions! If I’m wearing sunglasses when I run into someone I know here, I always take them off to talk.